If you don’t eat breakfast, you set yourself up for a fat-storing kind of day.

Becoming hypoglycemic before you even get the kids off to school or get to the office in the morning is a formula for weight gain, regardless of how few calories you eat each day. When the body senses hunger its first tendency (after compulsion to grab a high-carb food) is to store fat. That’s right – store fat – not burn fat – no matter how few calories you limit yourself to… Your body will hold onto fat as its “preservation” and burn down muscle. Muscle uses fat for fuel so if we burn that down then we have less muscle to burn fat than before.

Without food for an extended period of time the body goes into preservation mode and stores fat in response to “starvation” even though it may be only the period from dinner the night before until you next eat mid-morning or at lunch. There continues a prevalent myth of “the fewer calories, the more I’ll lose weight” and that’s just not true.

In fact, Tufts University scientists report that regularly eating breakfast (a combination of carb, protein and fat) can help you shed 10-15 pounds each year! Plus, Harvard studies show that eating early in the day can help increase your focus and memory as much as 40 percent.

Each day the body calls upon 3 primary energy sources to fuel our bodies and we burn these sequentially (for the purpose of preservation in times of hunger/starvation). First we draw down glucose (and stored glycogen); next, primarily muscle, with some fat; lastly, the body burns fat stores. It wants to hold on to these fat stores to preserve us through hungry times – the body cannot anticipate when you will next deliver nutrition so its response is to hold onto life-saving fat stores.

When we skip breakfast our body’s response is to preserve fat.

And who wants that!?